H-France Review Vol. 20 (October 2020), No. 184 Jordan R. Hayworth, Revolutionary France
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H-France Review Volume 20 (2020) Page 1 H-France Review Vol. 20 (October 2020), No. 184 Jordan R. Hayworth, Revolutionary France’s War of Conquest in the Rhineland: Conquering the Natural Frontier, 1792-1797. Cambridge Military Histories. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xviii + 340 pp. Map, notes, bibliography, and index. $120.00 U.S. (hb). ISBN 9781108497459. Review by Ilya Berkovich, Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences. Anyone who studied Latin in high school or university is likely to be familiar with the opening phrase of Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars: “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.” While dealing more with its internal subdivisions, Caesar’s text could also be taken to infer the outer frontiers of Ancient Gaul: the Pyrenean mountains in the south and the great rivers Rhine and Rhône to the east.[1] Writing about a generation later, and using Caesar as one of his sources, the Greek geographer Strabo defined the boundaries of Gaul as the Pyrenees, the Rhine, and the Alps.[2] Many years later, these venerable classical authors were given a new lease of life. Taken out of context and cited selectively, the physical boundaries of ancient Gallia were evoked as the appropriate political frontiers for her modern successor state. But how early and to what extent did this desire for “natural frontiers” enter French political discourse? The Pyrenees have left little room for interpretation, while in the south east Caesar’s Rhône was typically substituted with Strabo’s Alps--albeit the former was prominently quoted to give Roman imperial flavour to modern territorial ambitions. The place where the natural frontiers really came to matter was the river Rhine. According to Albert Sorel, the push to the Rhine was one of the driving forces of French political history, dating back at least to the sixteenth century, if not earlier.[3] In other words, the Revolutionary Republic and the Napoleonic Empire both pursued the long-established ancien régime objective to restore and then preserve the historic French lands lost to German westward expansion in the early Middle Ages. In spite of its initial prominence among politicians and historians alike, Sorel’s thesis did not go unchallenged. Writing in the 1930s, Gaston Zeller demonstrated that the Rhine boundary did not figure in French political discussion before 1792 and that the entire concept of “natural frontiers” was, in fact, one of the many innovations of the Revolutionary period.[4] Nevertheless, current scholarly convention errs on the side of Sorel. To quote David A. Bell, the Rhine frontier was “the long- frustrated dream of the monarchy” which the Revolutionaries finally managed to achieve.[5] In his debut volume, Jordan Hayworth puts this view the test. Revolutionary France’s War of Conquest makes three fundamental claims: First, when several Revolutionary leaders embraced the natural frontiers framework, “they brought the idea into the political mainstream for the first time in French history” (p. xi): Sorel’s thesis must be discarded H-France Review Volume 20 (2020) Page 2 for good. Second, while natural frontiers did come to play a noticeable role in French military strategy, “practical and more conventional military concerns often predominated” (p. xi). Subsequently it became a more dominant concern contributing to the prolongation of the war and the overall failures in the German theatre in 1796. Third, the debate of the natural frontiers question did not unite the warring political factions. Rather, it caused further conflict and political strife which served to undermine the French Republic, contributing to the overall failure of its democratic experiment. These arguments are presented by means of a chronological narrative which artfully weaves together two strands: the debates of the French policymakers in Paris, and the operations of the French forces along the Rhine front. Standing out is the first chapter in which Hayworth re- examines the supposed old-regime roots of the “natural frontiers” by revisiting the evidence discussed by Sorel, Zeller, and, more recently, Peter Sahlins.[6] Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern intellectuals did make parallels between ancient Gaul and the kingdom of France, and a few did advocate for French expansion eastward. However, when it came to actual politics, writings such as Pierre Dubois’s On the Recovery of the Holy Land (c. 1306) or Jean le Bon’s The Rhine to the King (1568) fell on deaf ears.[7] French monarchs and statesmen could be opportunistic or even predatory, but their aims were guided by “pragmatism and self-interest” rather than “mystical conceptions of national history and ideology” (p. x). Cardinal Richelieu, widely regarded as the father of the French raison d’etat, is a good example. Richelieu welcomed a permanent French foothold on the Rhine in order to project power into Germany. The eventual conquest of Alsace did offer France a military corridor into the Holy Roman Empire, but this was only part of a broader strategy of alliances, subsidies and control over key fortresses. The Treaty of Münster in 1648 saw France relinquish its other conquests in the region. According to Hayworth, this geopolitical trend of trading wider territorial conquests for “more modest” but surer “gains and compensations” remained essentially unchanged until the fall of the Old Regime (p. 21). Stressing rational and natural forces, the new Enlightenment discourse did eventually contribute to the development of the limites naturelles by suggesting that natural frontiers make for more logical borders between states then those determined by old wars and dynastic treaties. Nevertheless, one still needed to have a revolution to give these ideas any political traction whatsoever. The main part of the book can be divided into two halves. Chapters two to four tell a more familiar story. Following the early upheavals of 1789, the new French regime was clearly set on peace. Prompted by the Nootka crises, in May 1790 the National Assembly even issued a formal declaration disowning foreign conquests. However, less than two years later, war was declared against the Habsburg Monarchy. Tim Blanning and David Bell have produced excellent accounts of this spectacular political U-turn. Hayworth’s contribution to our understanding of the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars and their first three campaigns is by unravelling the convoluted way in which France’s wartime strategy developed. Whilst marketed primarily as a military history, Hayworth’s volume is in fact a superb example of an intellectual history of war. Hayworth agrees with previous scholarship that, although it was also prompted by presence of émigré forces in the Rhineland, the initial decision to go to war was inspired by the militant republicanism of Pierre Brissot. Together with the other Girondins, Brissot believed that a short victorious war would unite and reinvigorate the French nation, while helping to export revolution to Europe. The failure of the first offensive into the Austrian Netherlands in spring 1792 was followed by the successful repulse of the allied invasion from the east, bringing the troops of the newly declared republic to the middle Rhine for the first time. Nevertheless, the H-France Review Volume 20 (2020) Page 3 experience of the first campaign forced the Revolutionaries to rethink their aim. “[W]ar of liberation [wa]s replaced by war of expansion” (p. 66). This was to be achieved by setting réunions: friendly republics, which were--naturally--to remain under French tutelage until their population was judged sufficiently free to govern itself. Renewed allied offensive from the north in early 1793 prompted the creation of the Committee of Public Safety which was soon to fall under Maximilien Robespierre. From 1790, Robespierre consistently argued against the war and the dangers of reckless foreign expansion (pp. 40, 55, 58, 69 82, and 89). Charged with dragging France into a desperate conflict, the Girondins were sent to the Guillotine and in March 1794 they were followed by Anacharsis Clootz, a Francophile Prussian ex-pat who was one of the few contemporaries of note supporting French expansion to the Rhine before 1792. A radical at home, Robespierre’s war aims were more consistent with traditional old-regime strategy: France should not over-exert herself. Annexation of key frontier areas was acceptable as long as it strengthened France’s borders. As for the rest of the occupied enemy lands, they should be kept as bargaining chips for the peace to come and in the meantime their resources should be exploited to support the French war machine. These ideas were shared by Lazare Carnot who followed them also after Robespierre’s downfall in the Thermidor coup. The Thermidorian reaction corresponded with French victory in the Low Countries. Too many accounts of the Revolutionary Wars jump from the glorious summer of 1794 to the meteoric rise of Napoleon during the Italian campaign of 1796, neglecting other events. Contemporary French policymakers did not have the benefit of this hindsight. For them, Germany remained the main theatre of operations, and larger forces were committed to it in the expectation that the conflict would be decided there. Chapters five to eight of Hayworth’s book cover this very period. His use of archival sources is particularly effective here, revealing the toxic dynamics which developed within the armies of the Republic. Raised under the motto la patrie est en danger, the French soldiers, who were now lining the Rhine from the Alps to the North Sea, expected an imminent end to the war. However, France’s foreign policy was now controlled by Jean-François Reubell and Charles-François Delacroix, who insisted on a “glorious peace” in which the Rhine was to become France’s new frontier (p. 269).